Elías Merino & Tadej Droljc: Synspecies Live A/V

Elías Merino & Tadej Droljc “Synspecies” Live A/V

(world premiere) SP/SI

SYNSPECIES is an audiovisual project created by Elías Merino and Tadej Droljc. It is inspired by virtual ecologies – unstable morphological spaces that emerge from the interaction of co-existing unrelated entities with the void.

SYNSPECIES are multi-scaled audiovisual objects that are cross pollinating, mutating, adopting and fighting for their space and existence. They co-create a world of unreal physicality that is constantly kneaded by violent forces. Their existence appears to us as fractured narratives in the perceptual phenomena that resemble a chain of synchronised chaos.

SYNSPECIES feed on tangles made by computer-based code and analogue signals. They originate from algorithmic computer-generated sound, Stockholm’s EMS Buchla and Serge modular systems, and 3D geometry synthesis. The vivid abstract architectures of SYNSPECIES fluctuate in an ambiguous pulsating time, hybridising and shaping new spaces confined in a perpetual disintegration process This project explores the states of bewilderment and the viscerality, framed in an oneiric cross-modal vastness.

The first work of the duo, the installation Spaceless Latitudes, was awarded with the Edigma Semibreve Award and was shortlisted for the Lumen prize in 2018.

SYNSPECIES is co-produced by L.E.V. Festival and supported by Arcadi Île-de-France, ENCAC (The European Network for Contemporary Audiovisual Creation) and consortium OSMO/ZA.

Elías Merino (b. 1985) is a Spanish-U.K. based sonic artist, researcher, and multidisciplinary practitioner. His recent and ongoing projects are included in a certain range of different aesthetics that Elías develops under different monikers. From algorithmic abstract computer music, to contemporary unusual electronics or instrumental music. He is interested in different approaches related with sound, digital culture and new media art, such post-digital materiality, object- oriented composition, time exploration, and posthumanities. Combining his personal activity, Elías is involved in collaborative projects.

His work has been exhibited, performed and diffused in festivals, galleries or museums across the U.S., Spain, South America, U.K. Romania, Portugal, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Poland, Finland, or The Netherlands. His recorded albums have been released in different labels including leerraum or Room40 among others.

Tadej Droljc (b. 1981) is a Slovenian interdisciplinary artist and creative coder who works in the field of electronic music, computer-generated audiovisual composition and other forms of intermedia art. His recent work is focusing at what he calls a pluralistic approach to real-time audiovisual composition, where various hierarchies between sound and image co-exist inside individual compositions.

For his solo works, Tadej was awarded the Lumen Prize Student Award, Dennis Smalley Scholarship in electroacoustic music and he won the Most Promising Video Artist prize at the Madatac. He performed and exhibited his works at the festivals such as Ars Electronica, L.E.V. Festival, Brighton Digital Festival, Semibreve, Node or Athens Digital Arts Festival among others. Currently, he is collaborating with Ars Electronica’s Futurelab on the project Immersify